Y-DNA from Germany in the 300s-400s AD shows 58% frequency of I1 and not much R1b

@Tomenable,

The French side of the Rhine river has a mere 5-10% U106, while "Western Germany" has 24%(Myers 2010). There's a low chance Belgium has much more than Eastern France.

Britanny, Medival refuge from Anglo Saxons for Britons, has 4.4% U106(Evolutionary History of R1b M269 based on modern Iberian data). England has about 25%. The high amount of I1 from this late Roman-era grave in Germany and the two U106s from Roman-era Britons, isn't overwhelming evidence that U106 is decended of Celtic Belgea instead of Germanic people. It's pretty clear there's something specfic about Germanic languages and U106, especially West Germanic languages.

U106 is a Celtic and Slavic repellent. Where ever Celts and Slavs live U106 is rare. In Britanny and France and Ireland and Poland U106 is rare, while in England and Germany and Netherlands and Austria and Scandinavia U106 is popular.
 
12 samples from Görzig (Saxony-Anhalt) dated to the 300s-400s AD, of whom 7 or 8 were I1:

I1 --------------------------------------------------------- 7 (~58%)
I (likely I2 but can be some Russian clade of I1) ---- 1 (~8%)
R1b ------------------------------------------------------- 1 (~8%)
R1 (most likely R1a, or some eastern R1b) ----------- 1 (~8%)
R1 (likely R1b but can be R1a-Z284 or L664) -------- 2 (~17%)


Source (see Table 3. on page 6 out of 7): LINK

Location of Görzig:

karte_g%C3%B6rzig.png


This shows that Ancient Germania was dominated by I1, not by R1b like today.

In this sample I1 is between 58% and 67%, while in modern Germany just 16%.


==========================

R1b came to dominate what is now Germany only as the result of Frankish conquest:

Here is my hypothesis:

1) Frankish realm = R1b majority; Germanic tribes between Rhine and Elbe, including Saxons = I1 / I majority:

6th+century.png


The extent of the Frankish realm in the 5th century and its early expansion:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJHEXQdtt6Q

Frankish_homeland.jpg


2) Franks expand into Pagan Saxons, Thuringians and others; with Frankish authority come many R1b settlers:

9th+century.png


3) Further expansion of East Francia - or Germany as it is now called - into Slavic lands between Elbe and Oder:

12th+century.png


Settlers who expanded into lands between Rhine and Oder came mostly from these areas:

Ostsiedlung.png


"Ostsiedlung" settlers came from areas which are today the Netherlands, Belgium, and the French-German borderland. Most of them spoke West Germanic dialects, but many also spoke Romance (e.g. Walloons). Ashkenazi Jews were part of that too.

Many came from westernmost parts of modern Germany (the Rhineland). Many also came from Friesland (Frisia).

Modern situation (numerically dominant haplogroup by country):

Of course details are wrong in this map (for example, the most numerous hg in Sardinia is in fact I2):

Obecnie.png
to be correct we see druring 300 AD 66% compared to 23% "I" today. 25% R1b compared to 44% and 17% R1a compared to 16%.

The frequency of R1a hasn't changed much, but the frequency of I vs R1b has shifted in favour of R1b. But who even thought that the frequency even just 1500 years ago would be very similar to that today? Central Europe has a history of ethnic cleansing (Suebi ) and immigration ( Goth, Vandals). But I am not surprised to see frequency of I dominating since this Haplogroup is also the dominant among the Scando Germanics who have had less history of immigration and such. But just as in Germany also in Scandinavia there is very significant frequency of R1b and R1a.

We also need some samples from other regions of Germany.
 
Am I missing something here? Weren't the Frankish Germanic themselves.
 
Am I missing something here? Weren't the Frankish Germanic themselves.

The bulk of the population of the Frankish Empire were Non-Germanic descendants of Roman citizens.

Those Roman citizens were themselves descended from Gauls and Belgae who adopted Latin language.
 
we see druring 300 AD 66% compared to 23% "I" today. 25% R1b compared to 44% and 17% R1a compared to 16%.

You made a mistake in your calculation, because 66% + 25% + 17% = 108%.

We have the following 12 samples:

7 samples of I1 = 58% (compared to only 16% I1 today)

And the remaining 5 samples are:

1 sample of "Russian I" = 8% (probably I2, but could be I1 too)
1 sample of R1b = 8%
2 samples of "Western European" R1 = 17% (most likely R1b)
1 sample of "Eastern European" R1 = 8% (most likely R1a)

So we have 8% of presumed R1a, not 17% as you claim.

And we have probably 25% of R1b.
 
Fire Haired 14 said:
In Britanny and France and Ireland and Poland U106 is rare, while in England and Germany and Netherlands and Austria and Scandinavia U106 is popular.

Check this 2015 paper on U106 by Iain McDonald:

http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~mcdonald/genetics/u106-geography-2015-revised.pdf

On page 4 out of 22 he gives frequencies of U106:

U106+frequencies.png


Celtic "Urheimat" as well as lands of the Belgae have high frequencies of R1b-U106:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallstatt_culture

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Tène_culture

Beaker Folks were IMHO not Celtic - they spoke some language which is long EXTINCT by now:

Celts.png


eurocelt.jpg
 
Hallstatt Celtic influence in the British Isles outside of England itself was small:

(so the Welsh are not genetically Celtic, they just speak a Celtic language; like Afro-Americans speak English):

Hallstatt_La_Tene_map.gif
 
The bulk of the population of the Frankish Empire were Non-Germanic descendants of Roman citizens.

Those Roman citizens were themselves descended from Gauls and Belgae who adopted Latin language.

the Franks didn't displace the original population, neither did other Germanic tribes that crossed the borders of the former Roman empire
there are no indications that the Franks replaced populations in territories they conquered subseqently
the Franks were merely a ruling class
if they did so in Saxony, that would be an exception
 
@Tomenable,

Belgium is right next door to the Netherlands, and many there speak Dutch. Austrians speak German, so of course they have lots of U106. Belgea were conquered by Rome, then Franks. Anglo Saxons obviously brought most of the U106 to the Isles, because it so much more popular in England than Celtic Isles people. Anglo Saxons came from Denmark and Germany, not former Belgea country. Belgea can't explain the strong presence of U106 in Scandinavia at all.
 
Maybe the original Franks were also mostly I1 but absorbed a lot of r1b from their conquests to the west. Population density was likely far higher in post-Roman Gaul than in Germania due to the technological differences. So a lot of the Romans/Gauls would have been absorbed by them, passing on their language and culture and therefore also ethnic identity.
That's a possibility at the moment. We have to wait and see. Tomenable might be right asserting that most U106 in Francs came from Celts farther west. Later when Frankish empire was a dominant force its citizens spread to the rest of Germany and Central Europe bringing U106 with them.
 
The question of an eventual colonization of Saxony by galo-frankians, let say it, is unheard to me and is against the known Frankish politics over conquered territories to appoint Frankish officials to rule the region. I don't know any Frankish colinization but i don't know everything...

The high percent of Y-DNA I could be explained more easily with this map:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Germanic_expansion.gif

The region of the samples was Germanized some five-six centuries before, so all possible admixture was not done yet.

Take per example the case of Spaniards in Peru, the possible admixture with locals after let say 1000 years, and the actual genetic map of the country with prodominant indigenous regions against the european ones.
 
Tomen,

I have the feeling, that you created a theory, which will be soon crushed :)

Of course, it is possible, what you are assuming, BUT 12 samples from
only one place don't seem to be adequate to all Germania at that time.

And I have a quite good intuition, which many times was right. :)
 
The question of an eventual colonization of Saxony by galo-frankians, let say it, is unheard to me and is against the known Frankish politics over conquered territories to appoint Frankish officials to rule the region. I don't know any Frankish colinization but i don't know everything...
What we are referring too is a slow migration of population from West to East Germany, then later from Germany to Poland, Prussia or even Russia, which pretty much lasted to 1,400 hundreds.
220px-Deutsche_Ostsiedlung.png

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostsiedlung
 
That's a possibility at the moment. We have to wait and see. Tomenable might be right asserting that most U106 in Francs came from Celts farther west. Later when Frankish empire was a dominant force its citizens spread to the rest of Germany and Central Europe bringing U106 with them.

It would be ironic if a Germanic tribe (Franks) caused a large genetic replacement of Germanic DNA in Germania with that of foreigners. Funny how Merkel is doing the same to modern Germany.
 
Maybe the original Franks were also mostly I1 but absorbed a lot of r1b from their conquests to the west. Population density was likely far higher in post-Roman Gaul than in Germania due to the technological differences. So a lot of the Romans/Gauls would have been absorbed by them, passing on their language and culture and therefore also ethnic identity.

I1, or at least his immediate ancestor is exceedingly old in northern or central Europe, so it's highly unlikely they were the Indo European speakers. This leaves only R1a or R1b, Battle Axe and Atlantic Bronze/BB specifically to have brought Germanic speaking languages to central/northern Europe.

To Tomenable's point that I1 was more frequent, I think that's jumping to conclusions a little bit. Let's not forget this is still a very small sample which could also be overestimated with kinship. We also see samples 2 of 2 which were R1b in a Berlin sample, and 1 of 1 as I1 in Anglo-Saxon England. The only thing this suggests is that I1 was likely brought with Germanic speakers, not the relative percentages of the population around 400 AD.
 
Lebrok. I know such colonization process, but is not related to the Frankish kingdom but to the Holy German Empire, and the colonized lands were mainly slav instead... as i understood the poster atributes actual R1b to galo-frankish colonization which is to me unheard.

Also to compare actual mean german genetics with old ones is to me a very gross mistake taking into account that Germany is a political product of the XIX-XX Centuries and that such territory suffered various known migrations: celts in the south, germanics coming gradualy from the north, romans ruling the south, slavs occuping the east, and then germans colonizing slavic lands in the east till reaching Wien and so.
 
These are very interesting samples, but I have to agree with Maciamo here that we can't read anything into the frequencies at all. Any given family tomb having very high percentages of I1 doesn't tell us any more about the larger Germanic population than modern carriers of the surname English surname Mead being ~68% I2 tells us about the larger English population.

Are there at least STRs or some way we can see how much diversity there is in the I1?
 
I1, or at least his immediate ancestor is exceedingly old in northern or central Europe, so it's highly unlikely they were the Indo European speakers. This leaves only R1a or R1b, Battle Axe and Atlantic Bronze/BB specifically to have brought Germanic speaking languages to central/northern Europe.

To Tomenable's point that I1 was more frequent, I think that's jumping to conclusions a little bit. Let's not forget this is still a very small sample which could also be overestimated with kinship. We also see samples 2 of 2 which were R1b in a Berlin sample, and 1 of 1 as I1 in Anglo-Saxon England. The only thing this suggests is that I1 was likely brought with Germanic speakers, not the relative percentages of the population around 400 AD.

This makes a lot of sense.
 
Europe_Y-DNA_map.jpg


Six ancient human remains from the Late Neolithic Bell Beaker site of Kromsdorf in Germany belonged to R1b and the R1b people were present in modern-day Germany by 2,000 BCE (Lee et al. 2012). The Germanic tribes were originally from Scandinavia and they settled in present-day Denmark by 750 BC and their settlements were expanded to Southern Germany by AD 1. The German article (Harthun et al. 2015) concludes that these ancient individuals were Central Europeans, arguing that haplogroups I, J and E were introduced from the Middle East to Europe around 10,000 years ago, but the Görzig site could have been one of those Norse settlements, considering the high percentage of hg I1. Some regions of modern-day Germany may have been largely inhabited by the Germanic tribes with haplogroup I1 and they gradually admixed with the R1b population before the emergence of a common German identity. Today, R1b and I1 account for 36% and 16% in East Germany respectively and R1b is the majority haplogroup in South Germany and West Germany (47-48%).

Germanic_tribes_%28750BC-1AD%29.png

The expansion of the Germanic tribes 750 BC – AD 1 (after the Penguin Atlas of World History 1988)

The transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture in Europe is associated with demographic changes that may have shifted the human gene pool of the region as a result of an influx of Neolithic farmers from the Near East. However, the genetic composition of populations after the earliest Neolithic, when a diverse mosaic of societies that had been fully engaged in agriculture for some time appeared in central Europe, is poorly known. At this period during the Late Neolithic (ca. 2,800-2,000 BC), regionally distinctive burial patterns associated with two different cultural groups emerge, Bell Beaker and Corded Ware, and may reflect differences in how these societies were organized. Ancient DNA analyses of human remains from the Late Neolithic Bell Beaker site of Kromsdorf, Germany showed distinct mitochondrial haplotypes for six individuals, which were classified under the haplogroups I1, K1, T1, U2, U5, and W5, and two males were identified as belonging to the Y haplogroup R1b. In contrast to other Late Neolithic societies in Europe emphasizing maintenance of biological relatedness in mortuary contexts, the diversity of maternal haplotypes evident at Kromsdorf suggests that burial practices of Bell Beaker communities operated outside of social norms based on shared maternal lineages. Furthermore, our data, along with those from previous studies, indicate that modern U5-lineages may have received little, if any, contribution from the Mesolithic or Neolithic mitochondrial gene pool.
 
Last edited:

This thread has been viewed 96899 times.

Back
Top